Do You Remember Your Mother?
by halftruthsandhyperbole
Summary: Anakin tells Luke about Shmi. (Cover image is by Chris Trevas)
Anakin's ghost came to Luke, at times. Shimmering, spun of blue-white light, like the three moons on Tatooine that Luke had gazed upon as a boy, wishing he was there, somewhere, anywhere but here on this barren world of hardship so far from anything at all, this world that so many of his friends had shook from them as they would shake the sand from their boots and their cloaks. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes Luke felt that Anakin was trying to speak to him but either could not make himself heard or Luke could not make himself hear. As they grew older-well, as Luke grew older because Anakin was as he had been years ago, a young man, and so he remained in death-they were able to understand each other better.

There were many things Luke wanted to ask his father, such as why, but he would not, could not, ask him that. He had no judgment for his father, not anymore at least. He would ask, he decided, things of the past, when things were better, despite the Clone Wars. Maybe his father could tell him about his time with old Ben (though maybe not, Luke thought, as grief pained like a dull ache somewhere in his heart, maybe not).

Finally, he gathered his courage. It happened when he was lying on his cot in the Falcon, when everyone else had gone to sleep, when he had felt so alone and his father must have felt it, must have seen it, because where there had been only shadows, then there was Anakin Skywalker as if fashioned from the moonlight, and Luke smiled at his father, the one he had known to exist beneath Vader's mask.

"My son," his father said, raising a hand towards him, one made of metal and circuitry. It was like Luke's, and so Luke reached with that hand for his father.

"Would you tell me about my mother? My real mother?" he asked. The words fell from him in a rush. Leia remembered, why couldn't he? They had been twins. He hated that he did not remember her.

Anakin turned away. "Don't ask that of me. Not yet."

Though translucent and made of light, Luke thought he appeared stoic to hide a suffering that he still carried, even in death. But he could understand why Anakin would not want to speak of someone whom he had loved and lost.

Luke knew loss for he still carried Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Obi-Wan, Biggs, Yoda, his father. Leia never spoke of Alderaan though he knew she carried the weight of that world on her thin shoulders.

They carried these burdens that weighed so heavily upon them, that hurt them so much that words could not give it shape.

Luke understood that. "I am sorry," he whispered, though he was not sorry for asking but for the pain and the suffering and the sadness.

His father drifted towards him to the bed. He rested his hands on his knees, his head bowed. "Do you miss Tatooine?"

The words he promised Ben about never coming back resonated through him. But he had come back-he had come back for Han. You're gonna die here, kid, Han had said as he had began to see the golden, desolate wasteland of sand that would always be Tatooine. Luke had always known in his heart that the sand would claim him.

The sand swallowed everything. The sand took everything. It had buried his aunt and uncle because Luke had not. Had not been able to bring himself to do so.

His eyes itched and water seeped from them.

"No," Luke said. "I don't miss Tatooine."

"Nor do I," Anakin said. His hand seemed to grip the blankets beside Luke's feet, and when he raised his hand, Luke saw ghostly sand streaming between his fingers. "Yet I feel it is always there, waiting for me to come back like a lost son. Sometimes, I like to think it is my mother who waits for me. Who calls to me still." His eyes met Luke's. "I miss her very much, even now, though it is not very becoming of a Jedi."

Luke thought the Jedi way in that regard was stupid but he kept his thoughts to himself. Instead, he said, "Will you tell me about her then, about your mother?"

Anakin settled on the bed. His hand fell through Luke's, a ghostly presence that Luke treasured.

Anakin's mother was named Shmi Skywalker, and she was a slave, sold by the Hutts.

Anger flared through Luke, and he thought of Leia killing that slug, and he thought, yes, it had been just.

Shmi was a child of the desert, like them. Life had not been kind to her. She had not always been a slave, but a slave she became, and she bore Anakin into slavery. But she had protected Anakin as best she could. He had not always recognized it, as a child, but when he had grown older, when he had been able to see, he had known it, and it pained him to think that he could not protect her in turn.

"She was fond of wearing blue, like the purest water, the kind that only the rich could buy and drink," Anakin said. He remembered that when almost everything else had faded from memory, no matter how hard he tried to remember–he had been taken from her when he had been too young. But he remembered the blue she had worn because he had run towards her, run towards that hope of color, when he had been afraid to follow Qui Gon Jinn, into a world that would not be like the one he had known all his short life, in a world without her.

After she had told him to go, to be brave, he had looked behind him though his mouth and eyes were full of sand, and he had seen that she was still there, watching him go until the horizon, a smudged gold haze of wastelands, would take him truly from her, and he would become the son she had once known, the son she had once raised, the son she would always love.

He had thought for sure that the Jedi would return with money that Watto would accept and free her after they had freed Naboo from the separatists.

Luke was stricken as Anakin stared at him, his voice hard, his voice cold. "But I was a child who believed in childish things. But still-I think of the Clone Wars, a war fought to free systems from the tyranny of the Separatists, of Dooku, and I think all of that for so many worlds and yet nothing for the slaves on Tatooine, nothing for someone I loved and cared for."

"No," Luke said. "No. I would think that too." If he had been Anakin, if he had known that his loved ones were still in slavery while he was free, when he had the power to save them-his mouth dried like the deserts. If he was a Jedi, like his father before him, that would not be his way, that would not be their way.

"I dreamed of her always," Anakin said, "not just of her death or her suffering." He told Luke that he had dreamed of her hands. Her skin had been calloused and cracked from the heat, but her fingers had been nimble and clever, had carved beads from the bones bleached white from Tatooine's twin sons. She had taught him how to do it too, and he had made little trinkets for his friends. He remembered the way her hands had folded over his as she had shown him how to hold the knife, how to find the shape of the thing he saw in the bone, in its heart. Once, she had fashioned a necklace for him, a thing of beads and twisted twine. He had loved it. He had worn it always.

It had also been taken from him, just as they had shorn his head and braided his padawan braid. He had saved it from the fire that they had fed with his old clothes. The cloth had not been fine or suitable for the Jedi who all dressed in a similar fashion to each other. It had been too coarse, like sand, and rough, like sand, but it had been his, something that Shmi had made for him, too, and he had watched the cloth burn and thought of home.

"Do you know where the necklace is now?" Luke asked.

Anakin did not.

"Tell me more," Luke said.

Anakin closed his eyes, and for a moment, Luke was afraid that he would vanish, dissipate, as the Jedi did sometimes, as Obi-Wan had and Yoda too.

He tried to squeeze his hand around his father's but there was nothing there but air and memory. He thought, though, that Anakin smiled at him, indulgently, perhaps. "I'm not going anywhere," he said like a promise.

He told Luke how he had asked too about his father, and how Shmi had told him that his father was of no concern of his. Later, the Jedi told him that she had told Qui Gon that there was no father, only the Force.

"I did not want to believe that," he said, simply. "I'm still not sure I do. But sometimes, I know she wished there was someone else who could have helped raise me. She was lonely, I think. She wanted someone. She wanted to fall in love."

He confessed to Luke that he had been angry when he had found out about Lars. That he had wondered if he had truly loved her, if he would have freed her even if she had left Tatooine without looking back-or if he had taken advantage of someone who had no choice, if Shmi, canny and wise as she was, had seen an opportunity for freedom, and had this time taken it for herself.

"I wanted someone to love her, like she deserved to be loved," Anakin said. He looked at Luke. "She didn't deserve her suffering-not as a slave, and not-not what happened after."

"What happened?" Luke said, a dread growing in his heart.

Anakin looked away. "She died, as all must do, but she died too soon. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't help her, as she had me. I couldn't-protect her." His voice was breaking.

"I'm sorry," Luke said. He thought there was more to this story, but he did not ask, content that Anakin would maybe share the rest with him in time. Instead, to fill the silence, he told Anakin about Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, how they had spoken of their mother with kindness and sadness and yearning, as if they missed her still. He was certain it was Shmi they had spoken of, though Uncle Owen had always brushed his questions of her aside. Not your business, Luke, he had said. The desert had claimed her as its own, as it did all the folks who lived and died on Tatooine. Best to leave the past alone.

"I am glad that there are others who remember her," Anakin said.

Luke was afraid that his face would betray him. He did not tell Anakin that the stormtroopers had destroyed his home, killed what little family he had once known, that he could claim as his. "Me too," he said, softly. "I will remember her, father, I swear it."

He did not remember falling asleep, but when he woke, it was morning and his father's ghost has gone. He rose, found his sister, and he said to her, "I learned about our grandmother, about Shmi Skywalker," and he told her everything he knew.


End file.
